Jasper Miles (1782 - 1849)

Eleanor Jones Hollenback Welles (1788-1896), Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania;

Her son, Mathias H. Welles (1819-1899), Towanda, Pennsylvania;

His son, Nelson Ackley Welles (1857-1941), Wyalusing, Pennsylvania;

His daughter, Nellie Welles (1897-1982), Elmira, New York;

Her daughter, Mary Welles Mooers (1924-2015), Elmira, New York;

Samuel Herrup, Sheffield, Massachusetts sold at the Philadelphia Antiques Show, April 22, 2016.

Leslie and Peter Warwick, Love At First Sight: Discovering Stories About Folk Art & Antiques Collected by Two Generations & Three Families, (New Jersey: 2022), pp. 270-1, fig. 450-1.

Eleanor (Ellen) Hollenback was born on January 21, 1788 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Her great grandparents originally emigrated from Württemberg, Germany to New Hanover, a part of Philadelphia, in 1717 and her father, Matthias “Matt” Hollenback (1752-1829), was a very active trader and became a large landowner, with trading posts in Athens, Pennsylvania, Elmira and Owego, New York. He married Sarah Hibbard Burnitt in 1782 and they had four children including Ellen. In 1816, at the age of twenty-eight, Ellen married Charles Fisher Welles and the two settled in Wyalusing, Bradford County, Pennsylvania.

Charles Fisher Welles was born in Glastonbury, Connecticut, and moved to Athens, Pennsylvania when he was nine. In 1812, he was appointed by the Governor of Pennsylvania to serve as the Prothonotary (chief clerk of the courts) of Bradford County, Pennsylvania and also managed one of Hollenback properties in Wyalusing, where he met and eventually married Ellen in 1816. They first built a log cabin in 1820 and then a house in 1822 known as the Big Red House on the Hollenback property and had ten children. Most of the children worked on their farm, Grovedale Farm, which mainly produced dairy but also wheat, corn, rye, oats, buckwheat, and potatoes. Their farm grew to 950 acres which was six times larger than the surrounding farms and three times as valuable. Their eldest daughter, Jane and her husband, George Bixby, built and moved into the adjacent house in 1842, which is now the families’ private museum, Wyalusing Valley Museum. Both houses are still standing today on the original Hollenback property. Charles died in 1866 and Ellen died in 1876, at the age of eighty-eight years-old.